Descent Into Antiparos

Transcription

To reach the Grotto of Antiparos, a visitor descends roughly fifteen hundred feet below the surface, down three successive precipices, deeper with each stage. The grotto itself opens into a space some three hundred feet long and nearly two hundred feet high, large enough that a lit torch barely reaches its farthest walls. Hanging from the ceiling and rising from the floor are stalactite formations the book likens to enormous icicles, pale stone built up drop by drop over an unknown span of time. The way down is not gentle; each precipice must be passed in turn before the chamber opens out below. What waits at the bottom is not treasure or passage to anywhere else, only the grotto itself: stone shaped slowly, in the dark, by nothing but dripping water.